You can download this font for personal use at dafont.com or fontspace.com

I wanted to design a font that was evocative of those old pulp horror magazines like Weird Tales but perhaps its greatest source of inspiration can be found by looking no further than Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt…

The painting used in this promotional image is one of my own. It’s part of a larger still life done in oils.

Sometimes I will do a small study in a watercolor sketchbook with a paper thickness at around 300g. I primed the page three times with a transparent primer and then drew the image in. I then primed it once more and set about my painting employing a limited palette. I put a light wash over the drawing using raw umber to establish the overall mid tone. I get all the dark values in first using raw umber before subtracting the paint for the lighter areas. You can use your fingers or a cloth or both as required. Titanium white is then used in the lightest areas and then I use lamp black or a nice bone black for accents and the darkest darks.

I tend to work from the hair into the flesh finding all my local colors and only add refinement when everything is done.

Just remember that the mid tones are neither as dark or as light as should be. You should work out your darkest darks and lightest lights from your mid tones.

For this little study I used a very simple pallet: Raw Umber, Titanium white and a Light Ochre which has great transparency.

This is a self portrait of William Hogarth. It is one of his earliest known portraits. He was a very interesting man; a painter, a printmaker, an art theorist; certainly someone worth getting to know.

This plate was taken from a now available reprint of Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome’s Drawing Course.

If you want to learn how to move from general to specific forms, understand values and modeling, to understand the site-size technique, then please, get your hands on a copy of this wonderful publication.

A good, strong drawing with clean, clear lines is the best foundation for a good painting

Wright of Derby may not be the most famous painter around but despite that, he did produce some remarkable work. “A philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery” or “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump” are perhaps some of his most famous works. The above sketch was made after the painting he did of “The Reverend D’Ewes Coke, his wife Hannah and Daniel Parker Coke.”

Copying regularly from the masters can be a whole school of learning unto itself. I would encourage everyone who loves to draw and paint seriously to follow this practice.

Allegory, the first of an initial group of fonts that I have designed. It is presently available on fontspace.

]]>https://josephdawson.wordpress.com/2019/01/25/stompy/feed/0josephdawsonAllegoryWhat Art is forhttps://josephdawson.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/what-art-is-for/
https://josephdawson.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/what-art-is-for/#respondWed, 29 May 2013 17:01:49 +0000http://josephdawson.wordpress.com/?p=126I had just finished reading a collection of short stories by Mark Samuels and though I was able to appreciate them, being fine examples of the weird tradition in the current literature of this kind, I cannot say that I enjoyed them particularly. Yet threaded throughout were a number of well considered thoughts wonderfully expressed. One pseudo excerpt in particular, the author having attributed it to Thomas De Quincey is still rattling around my head. It runs thus:

“We continually regard what is miraculous as merely commonplace by virtue of extreme familiarity.”

I agree.

In short, for those in search of the miraculous: look no further but rather, Look!

The author is of course concerned with language, something that is suggestive of great mystery; a proof, he says, that this cosmos is not easily explained! It’s occurred to me that, perhaps coeval to speech, there was a desire to express our wonder at what came to us through the eyes so that image making may not have been too long upon the heels of the spoken word. Between what is written and what is painted there has always been a shared affinity; a constant since antiquity when it was chiefly the poet who determined in what manner a thing ought to be represented – its secondary detailing and embellishment alone being left to the creative powers of the artist to suggest.

It follows – and I do not fancy this to be mere conjecture – that the concerns of both Artist and Author are closely united. Each unveils in a manner appropriate to their mode of expression a facet of the common place heightened to the imminence and reality of experience renewed; a peak experience as Colin Wilson terms it, divested from the short sighted preoccupations of immediate physical and emotional concerns. An artist wishes to replace the opinions and fancies one might have about a thing with the thing itself uncoloured by our doubts and miseries.

We must retain our curiousity and wonder, otherwise the world becomes a boring and benighted procession of catalogued forms pointlessly self repeating. Not only is our will sapped when an unbalanced view of this kind prevails but we soon find our depth of experience prey to the emptiness of promised novelty and distraction. Only a debased view of the world contracts fine art and great literature to a condition of mere entertainment.